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Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction:Margaret Drabble's The Radiant WayLidan LinIndiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, linl@ipfw.eduThis research is a product of the Department of English and Linguistics faculty at Indiana University-PurdueUniversity Fort Wayne.

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Opus CitationLidan Lin (2005). Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction: Margaret Drabble's The Radiant Way. English Studies.86 (1), 51-70.http://opus.ipfw.edu/english_facpubs/250

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English Studies Vol. 86, No. 1/2, February 2005, 000 – 000

NEST861212 (NT)

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction: Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way

Lidan Lin

Although Margaret Drabble’s tenth novel, The Radiant Way (1987), has been almost

exclusively interpreted in the context of feminist criticism, the author’s use of spatial

narrative trope to give voices to diverse female experiences does not neatly fit the

paradigm of feminist fiction. Such paradigm, as Deborah S. Rosenfelt suggests, tends

to illustrate a linear ‘‘progress from [women’s] oppression . . . victimization . . . [to]

awakening,’’ a progress that usually concludes with female characters’ ‘‘reject[ion] of

heterosexual love, family, and motherhood’’ (pp. 269 – 70).1 Moving beyond such

paradigm in The Radiant Way, Drabble frequently suspends the flow of time in order

to juxtapose similar narrative events that take place simultaneously at different

locations: New Year’s Eve parties in London and Northam, New Year’s day in

different parts of London, and lunches in London, Northam, and New York. Such

spatial arrangement of episodes allows Drabble to expand the linear evolution of a

monolithic oppression-resistance plot into multiple parallel plots through which she

unfolds a variety of female experiences of three friends: Liz Headleand, a successful

psychiatrist whose 21-year marriage is falling apart; Alix Bowen, a happily married

English instructor and a devoted social worker; and Esther Breuer, an unmarried art

historian. By dramatizing the multifarious experiences of these ‘‘new women’’ as

Cambridge graduates, career women, mothers, widows, divorcees, and single women,

Drabble provides an inclusive network of human relationships through which she

Lidan Lin is at Purdue University, USA. 1My attempt to point out the feminist trend in the interpretation of The Radiant Way is by no means intended

to discredit critics falling in with this trend. On the contrary, their often insightful readings of the novel have

inspired and challenged me. Believing that critical boundaries are useful insofar as they remain flexible enough

to be redefined and redrawn, I hope to supplement the feminist approach of previous critics by directing

attention to the relationship between Drabble’s use of spatial narrative trope and its pervasive postfeminist

implications. For more recent feminist interpretations, see, for example, Bromberg, ‘‘Margaret Drabble’s The

Radiant Way: Feminist Metafiction’’; Rubenstein, ‘‘Sexuality and Intertextuality: Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant

Way’’; and Guedes ‘‘Female Quest Narratives: Magaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and The

Gates of Ivory.’’

ISSN 0013-838X (print)/ISSN 1744-4217 (online) #2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/0013838042000339835

2 L. Lin

affirms heterosexual love, motherhood, female friendship, and male – female

friendship while revealing the decencies and follies of both sexes.2

While Drabble’s use of spatial narrative trope to represent diverse female

experiences and her reluctance to polarize gender relations in The Radiant Way seem

unaligned with the feminist narrative chorus of oppression and resistance, the novel

shares remarkable formal and ethical kinship with what Rosenfelt3 describes as

‘‘postfeminist fiction,’’ a canon that emerged ‘‘in the mid-1980s’’ as ‘‘instructive

revisions of the feminist narratives.’’ Unlike feminist fiction, postfeminist fiction

tends ‘‘to reinstate heterosexual passion, especially motherhood’’; it replaces the

feminist ‘‘linear . . . narratives’’4 with ‘‘a multiplicity of plots’’ that dramatize ‘‘the diversity of women’s experiences’’ so that accounts of these experiences become

‘‘more honest and inclusive’’ (emphasis added).5 While objecting to unequal gender

relations and wishing to improve these relations, postfeminist novelists remain

suspicious of a monolithic explanation for the objectification of women under the

male gaze and refuse ‘‘to locate the sources of inequity in the masculine lust for

power and control.’’6 Politically reflexive and ethically generous, postfeminist

novelists emerge with a keen sense of self-awareness that is introspective enough to

ponder the ‘‘mistakes and totalitarian inclinations among women, and decencies and

vulnerability even among men.’’7 With Rosenfelt’s help, as I shall argue, we may

begin a new reading of The Radiant Way as a postfeminist novel by exploring (1)

Drabble’s use of spatial narrative trope to negotiate the politics of identity underlying

feminist fiction and her promotion of the postfeminist ethics that lays emphasis on

the diversity and complexity of female experiences; and (2) Drabble’s changing

relationship with the critical school of feminism and her evolution from a feminist

novelist to a postfeminist novelist.

If the turn from the espousal of identity politics to the appeal to ethics indicates a

new stage of development in feminist thought, a stage that also signals a transition

from feminism to postfeminism, then this significant moment in literary and cultural

history must be briefly delineated. The concern of feminist identity politics is largely

for the recovery of the female identity or self, lost as a result of the unjust cultural

2As Cunningham notes, in ‘‘Women and Children First,’’ 130 – 52: ‘‘Family background, the interaction between

parent and child, of husband and wife, or of lovers, provide the basic material of [Drabble’s] novels’’ (132). She

also notes that in dealing with these human relationships, Drabble ‘‘consciously embrace[s] . . . the complexities

of life’’ (134) that ‘‘demand the forging of personal and individual morality’’ (134), rather than reduce these

relationships to the feminist blueprint of oppression and resistance. 3Rosenfelt, ‘‘Feminism, ‘Postfeminism,’ and Contemporary Women’s Fiction,’’ 269. 4Rosenfelt, ‘‘Feminism, ‘Postfeminism,’ and Contemporary Women’s Fiction,’’ 268. 5Rosenfelt, ‘‘Feminism, ‘Postfeminism,’ and Contemporary Women’s Fiction,’’ 270. 6Rosenfelt, ‘‘Feminism, ‘Postfeminism,’ and Contemporary Women’s Fiction,’’ 280. 7Rosenfelt, ‘‘Feminism, ‘Postfeminism,’ and Contemporary Women’s Fiction,’’ 280. Although chiefly

revisionary, Rosenfelt sees postfeminism, sometimes called ‘‘third-wave feminism,’’ as a term that ‘‘connote[s]

not the death of feminism but its uneven incorporation and revision inside the social and cultural texts of a

more conservative era.’’ Like the post- in postmodernism and the post- in postrevolutionary, the post- in

postfeminism, for Rosenfelt, ‘‘acknowledges the existence of a world and a discourse that have been

fundamentally altered by feminism,’’ 269.

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction 3

practices of the patriarch. Thus, the female self or ‘‘I’’ becomes the point of view from

which ‘‘I’’ conceives of the world, a point of view that, because of its privileged goal

of ‘‘safeguard [ing] an identity,’’8 is easily susceptible to the exclusion of other points

of view. On the other hand, postfeminism, which rests on the premise of ‘‘otherness,’’

is concerned not only with securing an ontological status for the female self but with

achieving a balanced growth of the female self and her others—the child, the family,

and other relations. Postfeminist ethics therefore belongs to the realm in which ‘‘the

claims of otherness . . . are articulated and negotiated’’; it is within this realm that

‘‘selfish’’ or ‘‘narrow’’ considerations are subjected to cancellation, negation, [and]

crossing by principles represented as ‘‘deeper’’ and ‘‘higher.’’9

Yet, to make full sense of the formal and ethical kinship between The Radiant Way and postfeminist fiction, we must also understand the larger paradigm shift that has

shaped the epistemological and ethical contours of postfeminism.10 Generally

speaking, postfeminism ‘‘demarcates an emerging culture and ideology that

simultaneously incorporates, revises, and depoliticises many of the fundamental

issues advanced by Second Wave feminism.’’11 Drawing on Lacan’s theory of

‘‘sexuation,’’12 postfeminist theorists have come to question two fundamental

concepts buttressing the core of feminist theory: the association of female biology and

8Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 28. 9Harpham, Shadows of Ethics, 26. 10Since the paradigm shift in question largely indicates a relationship between second-wave feminism and

postfeminism, a quick definition of the former seems to be in order. It refers to ‘‘the formation of women’s

liberation groups in America, Britain, and Germany in the late 1960s. The term ‘second-wave’ implies that ‘first-

wave’ feminism ended in the 1920s’’ (Brooks, Postfeminisms, 212). Brooks succinctly puts this paradigm shift in

perspective: ‘‘The ‘paradigm shift’ from feminism to postfeminism can be seen in a number of different

directions: first, in the challenges posed by postfeminism to feminism’s epistemological foundationalism;

second, in postfeminism’s shift away from specific disciplinary boundaries; and third, in postfeminism’s refusal

to be limited by representational constraints’’ (210). Rather than use the term ‘‘waves,’’ some critics have chosen

‘‘generations’’ to distinguish the stages of development in feminist thought. For two perceptive discussions of

generational divisions, see Kaplan ‘‘Introduction 2,’’ 13 – 29; and Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time.’’ For more

background readings about this paradigm shift, see Phoca and Wright, Introducing Postfeminism. 11Rosenfelt and Stacey, ‘‘Second Thoughts,’’ 341. Like Rosenfelt and Stacey, Rene Denfield takes a revisionary

stance; for her, postfeminism ‘‘opposes the feminist conception of male bias as rooted in one global institution,

that of patriarchy.’’ For Denfield, one limitation of feminist theory is to reductively characterize society as

‘‘patriarchy’’ and to ‘‘lump men together in one undifferentiated class’’ (quoted in Wright, Lacan and

Postfeminism, 10). For more postfeminist critiques of feminism, see Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time;’’ Rosenfelt,

‘‘Feminism, ‘Postfeminism,’ and Contemporary Women’s Fiction,’’ 268 – 91; Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism,

Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms; Mitchell, ‘‘Introduction I,’’ 1 – 26; and Rose, ‘‘Introduction II,’’ 27 – 57. For

a useful summary of the cultural divide between feminism and postfeminism, see Kalbfleisch, ‘‘When Feminism

met Postfeminism,’’ 250 – 65. For more definitions of postfeminism, see Mascia-Lees and Sharpe, Taking a

Postfeminist Stand, 3. Feminist critics, on the other hand, tend to see postfeminism as a backlash against and

a betrayal of the hard-won feminist cause (for a discriminating exception to this generalization, see

Kaplan,

‘‘Introduction 2,’’ 13 – 29). Russo, ‘‘Notes on ‘Post-Feminism’,’’ 27 – 35, for example, showers her criticism this

way: ‘‘Postfeminism sounds like an insult, a wounding blow to a hard-won identification of a common cause

and lives already under siege by a New Right; at least it sounds like that to some.’’ She goes on with her

objections: ‘‘[Postfeminism] identifies with institutional and discursive power that women as a group, even the

many exceptional women theorists, do not have. At best, ‘postfeminism’ marks a discursive and theoretical

impasse that may release new strategies and narrative that may be, however provisional, utopian and affirming.’’

Although Koenen, ‘‘The (Black) Lady Vanishes,’’ 131, acknowledges that ‘‘postfeminism, diverging from earlier

4 L. Lin

patriarchal ideology and the identification of the patriarchy as the root cause of male

domination.13 Rejecting Freud’s biological essentialism that explains sexual difference

through penis envy and castration anxiety, Lacan shows that sexual identity, like the

human subject, is constituted through language, which is always the social speech of

the other. The very entrance into the symbolic system submits the sexual subject to

‘‘castration [limitation or prohibition] by language and speech.’’14 Lacan calls this

castration ‘‘phallic function,’’ which applies to both sexes. Lacan concedes that the

construction of sexual identity in the symbolic appears a nebulous process, insofar as

woman and man stand the same chance to insert themselves on the male or female

side of his diagram of the symbolic logic.15 However, man tends to identify with the

phallic function and imagines himself as ‘‘the master who issues the prohibitions,’’16

while woman is unable to identify with it as a universal set, which explains her

exclusion from the symbolic logic. This means, for Lacan, that The Universal Woman

does not exist because woman is ‘‘not whole . . . with respect to phallic jouissance,’’17

which further means that woman with a capital W as ‘‘a singular essence’’ and as ‘‘an

all-encompassing idea’’18 does not exist. What exists is ‘‘a multiplicity of women, but

no essence of ‘Womanhood’ or ‘Womanliness’.’’. While Lacan cannot explain why

woman’s side in the symbolic fails to identify with the phallic function as a universal

set, he does suggest that woman’s exclusion from the symbolic is not something that

‘‘nature can account for.’’19 For Lacan, finally, the problem of woman’s exclusion can

be addressed not by nullifying the phallocentric power network permeating all

spheres of social life but by constructing ‘‘a different symbolic term . . . or else by an

entirely different logic altogether.’’20

essentialist and monolithic concepts of ‘woman,’ embraces the idea of gender as a performative rather than

biological category,’’ she faults postfeminism for being ‘‘much more preoccupied with the theories of ‘male,

pale, Yale’ than those of women of color.’’ 12Wright, Lacan and Postfeminism, 18. 13These two concepts are generally supported by gender theories. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and

Gender From the Greeks to Freud, for example, shows that the anatomic knowledge about sex from the Greeks to

Freud is burdened with biased cultural practice in the disguise of science. For an explanation of the relationship

between female biology and patriarchal ideology, see Tong, especially ‘‘Biological Sex and Patriarchal Gender’’

7 95 – 138. 14Wright, Lacan and Postfeminism, 19. 15For an elaboration of how Lacan’s diagram of the symbolic logic works, see Wright, Lacan and Postfeminism,

23 – 32. 16Wright, Lacan and Postfeminism, 27. 17Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 7. 18Fink, ‘‘On Jouissance,’’ note 28. 19Rose, ‘‘Introduction II,’’ 40. 20Rose, ‘‘Introduction II,’’ 56. For detailed discussions of Lacan’s relationship to postfeminism, see Brooks,

Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms, 69 – 91. One of the feminist critics’ objections to

Lacan’s theory of sexuality is their suspicion of the structuralist model of Lacan’s symbolic, a model that treats

language as a system abstracted from the social practice and social context of communication. For Fraser (‘‘The

Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics,’’ 181), for example, the structuralist model

of language ‘‘reduc[es] discourse to a ‘symbolic system’’’ and, accordingly, ‘‘evacuates social agency, social

conflict, and social practice’’. Another is their critique of Lacan’s labeling of phallus as universal signifier; for

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction 5

Kristeva perceptively links Lacan and the analysis of postfeminist fiction by

locating the point where nonlinear narrative forms meet the epistemology and ethics

of postfeminism. Based on Lacan’s conclusion that The Universal Woman does not

exist, Kristeva21 revises the feminist ‘‘universalist approach’’ that tends to ‘‘globalize the problems of women,’’ opting, like Rosenfelt, for an emphasis on ‘‘the multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations, and the differences among the diverse

functions or structures which operate beneath this word [woman].’’22 To give voices

to these multifaceted functions of the signifier woman, feminist linear time—time as

‘‘teleology, linear . . . unfolding’’; time as ‘‘logic’’ and ‘‘history’’23—must be revised

and replaced by what Kristeva terms ‘‘Women’s Time.’’24 Lacan’s disclosure of the

epistemological fissure between nature and gender politics encourages Kristeva to

endorse the creative power of the maternal body and its ‘‘guiltless maternity.’’25 It is

from this maternal space that Kristeva derives Women’s Time, which corresponds to

the female ‘‘biological rhythms’’ such as ‘‘repetition . . . cycles [and] gestation’’; it

corresponds, finally, to the rhythms of mother ‘‘nature.’’26 Lacan’s doubt about the

association of the female body and male domination further affords Kristeva the basis

to conceive of a postfeminist ‘‘new ethics’’27 that calls for a retreat from the feminist

politics of anthropomorphic identity. Only in the wake of such retreat, Kristeva

insists, can women begin to ponder the question that really matters: ‘‘how can we

reveal [instead of being excluded from] our place [in the symbolic], first as it is

bequeathed to us by tradition, and then as we want to transform it?’’28

Kristeva’s illumination of the link between nonlinear narrative and postfeminism

lends theoretical support to the analysis of postfeminist fiction described by

Rosenfelt. For both authors, feminist linear narrative time—time as logic and

history—will not suffice in narrating the multiplicity of plots and, accordingly, the

diversity and complexity of female experiences. Both authors thus encourage women

novelists to explore alternative, nonlinear narrative forms to account for female

experiences that are at once similar yet heterogeneous, irreducible, and even

conflicting. Kristeva’s idea of Women’s Time—time as repetition and return—

suggests the possibility of an alternative temporal mode for the analysis of

them, Lacan simply collaborates with the patriarchy by gendering pre-existing cultural and social relations as

dominantly male. In doing so, Lacan tells us that ‘‘we cannot ask what determines the place of the phallus as

universal signifier . . . [and] leaves us with the alternatives of phallic culture or no culture at all’’ (Flax, Thinking

Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, 105). For a polemic

response to Fraser’s position, see Aoki, ‘‘Using and Abusing French Discourse Theory: Misreading Lacan and the

Symbolic Order.’’ 21Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 19. 22Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 18. 23Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 17. 24Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 13. 25Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 31. 26Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 16. 27Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 35. 28Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 24. However, for Russo, ‘‘Notes on ‘Post-Feminism’,’’ 31, Kristeva’s ‘‘assumption

of the link between women and mothering’’ signals yet ‘‘another biological retreat.’’

6 L. Lin

postfeminist fiction, yet since Kristeva omits demonstrating how we can apply

Women’s Time to the analysis of a specific postfeminist text, the applicability of

Women’s Time still remains to be worked out at the analytical level. However, in

light of Kristeva’s search for nonlinear narrative forms, Drabble’s experiment with

spatial narrative trope in The Radiant Way offers a viable alternative form of

narration, which, as we shall see, enables her to depict the diverse experiences of Liz,

Alix, and Esther whose stories—not of linear growth and development but of

parallels, conflation, and intersection—offer touching glimpses into the lives of post-

war British women. Spatial narrative form, one might say, permits Drabble to expand

a feminist violin solo of oppression and resistance into a postfeminist polyphony of

‘‘unnameable jouissance.’’29 From a postfeminist point of view, then, Drabble’s

revision of the feminist narrative paradigm opens the avenue to the connection

between spatial narrative and postfeminist fiction. It is this crucial, yet unexplored,

connection that I wish to investigate in this essay.30

Drabble begins by spatially juxtaposing five New Year’s Eve parties that

simultaneously take place in metropolitan London and rural Northam. At the

Headleands’ party, which opens the novel, Drabble initially brings out the polyphonic

aspects of the three women’s personal and social lives. Wealthy and successful, Liz

and her husband Charles give a glamorous party in their London mansion, a farewell

party, in a sense, since Charles will soon take a new job in New York. Keeping a

modern marriage, the narrator reveals, Liz and Charles sleep in ‘‘separate bedrooms’’

and meet for breakfast only ‘‘at weekends’’ (p. 9).31 And Liz, we are told, has decided

not to accompany Charles to New York but to stay and pursue her own career and

inner life. Alix, married, and Esther, single, are invited to the party and have decided

to ‘‘effect a double entry’’ (p. 3). Alix’s habit of being ‘‘thrift [y]’’ even over using

‘‘Fluid Foundation’’ (p. 2) and Esther’s residence of a ‘‘small flat’’ and her ‘‘pittance’’

(p. 22) from odd lectures and a little odd teaching suggest that neither woman is as

wealthy as Liz, but despite their different financial status, they remain close friends.

As hostess, Liz receives more narrative attention than her two guest friends; she

moves, throughout the party, ‘‘from group to group, surveying from the stairway,

engaging and disengaging, tacking and occasionally swooping’’ (p. 25). Indeed, when

the gossip involving Charles’s affair with Lady Henrietta leaks out toward the end of

the party, one might assume that Liz is the central character and that the unfolding of

the novel might center upon her sudden mid-life crisis. Yet, since Drabble does not

intend for The Radiant Way to be a feminist novel—to use her words, ‘‘a women’s

29Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ 16. 30By suggesting the connection between spatial narrative trope and postfeminist fiction, I do not mean that

spatial organization is unique of postfeminist fiction since such authors as James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, and

others have appropriated spatial form in their novels for non-postfeminist purposes. What I do want to suggest

is that Drabble’s use of spatial narrative trope clearly enables her to replace the feminist linear narrative of

oppression and resistance identified by Rosenfelt and Kristeva with a multiplicity of plots that grant voices to a

variety of female experiences. 31Margaret Drabble. The Radiant Way. All subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically

in the text.

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction 7

book’’32 with a master plot occupying the narrative center—she disrupts the reader’s

expectation by halting time temporarily to juxtapose the Headleands’ party with four

other celebrations in Northam.

The first celebration takes place in a ‘‘Georgian terrace house’’ (p. 44), where local

poets, artists, and musicians gather not to drink champagne, as do Liz’s London

guests, but ‘‘to laugh, to sing, to eat spinach salad and green bean salad’’ (p. 44). The

second depicts another public gathering in the ‘‘fashionable village-suburb of

Breasbrough,’’ where left-wing teachers, journalists, and social workers raise their

glasses filled with ‘‘Oake and Nephews Special Christmas Offer Beajolais’’ (p. 45). The

third consists of a gathering of family and guests in the home of Eddie Duckworth,

where there is ‘‘much laughter’’ (p. 46). The fourth is the family dinner at Liz’s sister

Shirley’s home with several relatives from her husband Cliff’s side; they eat, talk,

watch television, and play cards. A fifth New Year’s Eve event takes place in Liz’s

mother Rita Ablewhite’s home in 8 Abercorn Avenue, where she lies in bed, solitary

and sick, hopelessly ‘‘waiting for the clock downstairs to strike twelve’’ (p. 61).

Drabble’s spatial juxtaposition of four holiday gatherings and a fifth solitary

observance clearly disrupts the linear evolution of the novel. Such disruption allows

Drabble to initially shape The Radiant Way into a postfeminist novel by creating an

inclusive background against which she introduces the three female protagonists

whose rhythms of life will prove so diverse that they cannot be reduced to the

feminist monolith of victimization and liberation.

Drabble’s depiction of Liz, Alix, and Esther against a broad background marks her

longstanding fascination with the importance of social range in representing women.

Insisting that great novelists must exhibit ‘‘social conscience’’ and that great novels

must contain ‘‘a greater breadth,’’33 Drabble contends that such authors as George

Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, and Doris Lessing offer a wider social range than, say, Jane Austen

and Henry James. In the same interview with Cooper-Clark, Drabble contrasts

George Eliot and Jane Austen in praise of the former: ‘‘I admire George Eliot so much

because she’s so inclusive. She does tackle a very large range of subject matter. And

Jane Austen doesn’t. She didn’t care what was going on round the edges of the society

that she lived in.’’34 Diverse and inclusive in scope, location, participants, and

lifestyles, the multiple party scenes expose the reader to a kaleidoscopic picture of

England in an instant of time. The Headleands’ party, which summons 200 guests,

from Fleet Street journalists, television moguls, publishers, poets, psychologists, to

politicians (p. 8), panoramically dramatizes the social life of middle-class Londoners.

The four celebrations in Northam, on the other hand, present a rich mixture of

holiday atmospheres in Northern England. By blending the metropolitan and the

rural, the city gentry and the country folks, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the

ailing, as she does in the opening scene, Drabble suggests that such blending stands a

32Drabble, ‘‘Interview with Kenyon,’’ 57. 33Drabble, ‘‘Interview with Diana Cooper-Clark,’’ 23. 34Drabble, ‘‘Interview with Diana Cooper-Clark,’’ 23.

8 L. Lin

better chance to illustrate ‘‘the simultaneity of goings-on’’ and ‘‘the wholeness of our

experience,’’35 of which female experiences constitute a large important part. Roger

Bowen has noted Drabble’s gradually ‘‘enlarged canvas’’ and her evolution from a

chronicler of ‘‘northern provincial life and London’s metropolitan culture’’36 in her

early novels to a chronicler of ‘‘contemporary Britain’’37 in her mid-career novels,

and further to a chronicler of a global ‘‘postcolonial holocaust’’38 in The Gates of Ivory (1992). As Drabble expands her novelistic vision, she ‘‘begins to diagnose a

condition of the world rather than a condition of England.’’39 And such condition of

the world has already been anticipated in The Radiant Way, the first in the trilogy

that continued with A Natural Curiosity (1989) and ends with The Gates of Ivory, by

3 Drabble’s prediction that ‘‘the eighties [will be] the global decade’’ (p. 156).40

After initially revealing the three women’s polyphonic profiles, Drabble goes on to

dramatize the heterogeneous rhythms governing their daily lives by juxtaposing how

Liz and Alix spend their New Year’s day. Liz’s activities disclose a committed

psychiatrist whose career revolves round seeing patients and attending seminars and

conferences on the one hand, and a troubled woman suffering an unexpected setback

in her personal life on the other. The reader learns that Liz has been invited to give a

paper that day on Spenser’s version of the family romance at a conference organized

by Japanese psychologists and psychotherapists. But all day, even when she is

‘‘deliver[ing] her own paper’’ (p. 65), she is painfully disturbed by the thought of a

divorce. She keeps pondering and wondering what she could have done to keep

Charles from being stolen by Lady Henrietta. What has been lacking in her that

Charles has found in that lady, ‘‘the most boring woman in Britain’’ (p. 40)? Has she

really neglected him? But how can you neglect someone who is never there? What

would their children say to their divorce? What sort of ‘‘negotiations’’ (p. 64) will she

and Charles have? Arriving home ‘‘exhausted and demoralized’’ (p. 65), she calls Alix

to break to her the harrowing news of the scandalous affair.

Although also a working day, Alix’s New Year’s day presents a contrast to Liz’s.

Happily married to Brian Bowen, Head of Humanities at an adult education college,

Alix begins her day with Brian’s deft handling of their old car and his ensuing hugging,

light teasing, and caring reminder for her to ‘‘drive carefully’’ (p. 67). The reader

learns that, unlike Liz’s day given to a high-profile conference, Alix’s day is spent at the

35Drabble, ‘‘Mimesis,’’ 9. 36Bowen, ‘‘Investing in Conrad,’’ 287. 37Bowen, ‘‘Investing in Conrad, Investing in the Orient: Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory’’ 279. 38Bowen, ‘‘Investing in Conrad, Investing in the Orient: Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory’’ 281. 39Bowen, ‘‘Investing in Conrad, Investing in the Orient: Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory’’ 279.

8 40Greene, ‘‘Bleak Houses: Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble and the Condition of England,’’ 314, also notes that ‘‘The Radiant Way offers a wider . . . panorama of English society, encompassing north and south, working class,

middle class, professional and business classes.’’ Interestingly, Drabble’s evolution from a regional novelist to a

more global novelist parallels the changes in her life as a woman. The fact that her early novels contain domestic

9 motifs connected with babies has to do with her own ‘‘pregnancies’’ (‘‘Interview with Kenyon,’’ 45) and with the life of a mother. When her children grew up, she could ‘‘do research and travel’’ (‘‘Interview with Kenyon,’’ 46)

and actually went to India, Japan, New Zealand, and other places. The broadening of Drabble’s cultural horizon

has clearly enlarged the subject matter of her middle and late novels.

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction 9

Garfield Center, where she teaches English literature once a week, with ‘‘a bunch of

[female] prisoners’’ (p. 67). The reader also learns that Alix’s work at the Garfield is

purely motivated by her lofty ‘‘aspiration’’ to ‘‘make connections’’ (p. 68) between

seemingly isolated human lives, since the job hardly pays for the gas. From the houses

of Wanley, Leeds, Northam, and the Garfield Center, Alix sometimes glimpses ‘‘a

vaster network . . . which was humanity itself’’ (p. 68). Within this network, each

individual becomes a part of a whole, which has its distinct, its other meaning. The

individuals, for Alix, become ‘‘crossroads, meeting places . . . signs, conjunctions,

aggregations’’ (p. 69). Alix’s day closes with a happy scene in which she joins Brian and

their son, Sam, who are watching television. Esther, who appears on the second day of

the New Year, shares neither the advantages nor disadvantages of marriage; hers is a

world filled with her obsession with medieval European vegetation and with her love

of Italy. Drabble’s parallel accounts of Liz’s and Alix’s New Year’s day, followed by the

brief account of Esther, vividly illustrate a broad spectrum of female experiences: Liz’s

flourishing career and her marriage crisis, Alix’s devotion to social work and her

happy marriage, and Esther’s unmarried yet peaceful life. Inscribed with pains, tears,

happiness, and serenity, such multitude of female experiences, following the multiple

party scenes, further disperses the feminist monolith of oppression and resistance.

The pattern of parallel plots continues after Drabble moves the narrative ahead by

one day; here, she again suspends time by devoting a flashback to the three women’s

family background, their formative years in Cambridge, and their variegated

professional experiences. Because these plots are placed in close temporal

proximity—they always move forward in a parallel fashion and always keep pace

with one another—they seem more like tales of variety and simultaneity than tales of

linearity and separation. Growing up in rural Northam with a lunatic mother and an

absent father, Liz came to Cambridge ‘‘pale and fair and thin’’ (p. 81) and spent her

holidays in Northam reading ‘‘Victorian novels, . . . textbooks of anatomy . . . [and]

Freud’’ (p. 84). She also read the Book of Job, hoping that her early suffering would

one day be paid back, as ‘‘light was given to [Job] in misery, and life to the bitter in

soul’’ (p. 84). Raised by her socialist-minded parents, Alix grew up with a strong

conviction to socialist ideals and spent her holidays ‘‘working . . . for no pay . . . in a

suburb of Paris’’ (p. 84). A Jewish refugee, Esther spent her early childhood huddling

together with her brother and mother in ‘‘a boarding house in Manchester’’ (p. 88)

while her father was trying to escape from Berlin. The three women also traveled

similar yet different paths in their personal lives. Both Alix and Liz loved and married

during their years at Cambridge, and both soon found that they had married the

wrong men, but compared with Liz’s path, Alix’s was a more trying one. Pregnant

after three months of her first marriage to a man she no longer loved, Alix was soon

widowed and had to raise their son all by herself—her husband had suddenly

drowned in the swimming pool. Spending the next few years in hardship, tears, and

solitude (pp. 93 – 94), Alix nonetheless refused to accept the sympathy and pity of her

in-laws and her own parents. Liz’s first marriage to Edgar Lintot, who believed that

his work was always more important than hers (p. 94), fell apart after eight months.

10 L. Lin

Esther, who remained single, continued to dine with academics and architects; at the

same time, she embarked on an ‘‘enigmatic liaison’’ (p. 95) with a married Italian

anthropologist who taught her how to interpret medieval Italian iconography.

Rather than alienating them, these women’s divergent background and personal

lives cultivate in them a sense of solidarity, a sense that although ‘‘they have all lived

on the margins of English life [and been] outsiders’’ (p. 84), they have all proved

successful in Cambridge. Such different yet similar experiences further cast an impact

on the ways they understand and interpret the world and on their choices of

profession. Liz likes ‘‘to make sense of things, to understand. By things she meant

herself. Or she thought she meant herself’’ (p. 81). Alix would like to ‘‘‘change

things.’ By things she did not mean herself. Or thought she did not mean herself’’ (p.

81). Esther would like ‘‘to acquire interesting information. That is all’’ (p. 81).

Accordingly, Liz becomes a psychiatrist and asks questions about the self; Alix

becomes a part-time social worker and teaches English literature to female inmates to

change them; Esther, in search of edifying information, becomes an art historian.

While acknowledging the relevance of talent, industry, and luck41 to these women’s

academic success, Drabble suggests that their success bears witness to the changing

force of history. Certainly, Drabble well understands the institutional bias that traps

women in post-war British society, and such traps are often the subject of her early

novels. But Drabble also celebrates the many positive changes that have altered these

flawed institutions, changes that enable her female characters to live lives ‘‘very

different from their nineteenth-century counterparts,’’ lives ‘‘women have never lived

before.’’42 Drabble emphasizes these changes by contrasting Jane Austen’s provincial

and domestic heroines with her own mobile and Cambridge-educated new women, a

contrast strategically maneuvered to bring the force of history to bear on the new

social conditions surrounding post-war British women. One important change is the

availability to women of equal opportunity for higher education and scholarships, a

reality simply unimaginable for Austen and merely a dream for Virginia Woolf.

When Woolf published Three Guineas (1938), the opportunity of higher education

for middle-class women, let alone for working-class women, in England was ‘‘still

strictly limited.’’43 As Woolf writes: ‘‘If we measure the money available for

scholarships at the men’s colleges with the money available for their sisters at the

women’s colleges, we shall save ourselves the trouble of adding up and come to the

conclusion that the colleges for the sisters of educated men are, compared with their

brothers’ colleges, unbelievably and shamefully poor.’’44 It is no wonder that

Drabble’s sense of history as a shaping force of her female characters’ destiny echoes

Woolf’s conviction that ‘‘the novel is never written by the author, but by the

combined determinants of class, gender, and historical moment.’’45

41Bokat, The Novels of Margaret Drabble, 140. 42Drabble, ‘‘Mimesis,’’ 7. 43Woolf, Three Guineas, 44. 44Woolf, Three Guineas, 44. 45Mahaffey, ‘‘Virginia Woolf,’’ 790.

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction 11

Aided by the improved social milieu of ‘‘Welfare State and County Scholarships, of

equality for women,’’ Liz, Alix, and Esther all flourished in Cambridge and enjoyed

‘‘plenty of opportunities’’ (p. 83) thereafter. For Drabble, they emerge as ‘‘the elite,

the chosen, the garlanded of the great social dream’’ (p. 83), more empowered than

their 19th-century predecessors, who, in Austen’s day, ‘‘would never have met . . . in

Cambridge’’ (79). Indeed, unlike Austen’s women, who rarely venture to trespass the

village boundary, Drabble’s move around globally: Liz attends conferences in Japan,

Esther travels to Italy, and even the less mobile Alix relocates to Northam toward the

end of the novel. Unlike Austen’s women, whose adult lives are either blessed by

marriage or stigmatized by spinstership, Liz, Alix, and Esther manage not to let

marital relationships control their fate. Though distracted by her first divorce and by

Charles’s affair, Liz twice pulls herself together and pursues her career quite

efficiently. Even though Liz finds it extremely hard to take Charles’s denial of her, she

knows that she has ‘‘plenty to get on with’’ (p. 62); after all, she has ‘‘a brilliant career

. . . [and] a dozen children’’ (p. 121) still loving her. She even regrets being upset and

‘‘having burst into tears’’ (p. 62). Like Liz, Alix manages to move on after the sudden

death of her first husband. Although living on scraps from her part-time teaching

jobs and struggling against poverty, Alix refuses to succumb; she ‘‘renounced the role

of tragic widow with an austerity that irritated her would-be saviors’’ (p. 96). Esther,

who remains unmarried, devotes her time mainly to academic and social activities.

Accordingly, Liz’s quick recovery from her two marital muddles, Alix’s ability to

survive as a single mother, and Esther’s choice to remain single suggest that marriage,

the institution that once controlled the salvation or damnation of Austen’s

‘‘traditional’’ women, has lost a great deal of its power over Drabble’s ‘‘new’’ women.

An individual’s willingness to struggle against the limitations of circumstances and

fate is yet another element enabling the independence of the three women.

Commenting on Rose Vassilou in The Needle’s Eye (1972), Marion V. Libby46

remarks that after The Waterfall (1969), Drabble began to portray female characters

‘‘whose beauty and strength consist precisely in a struggle against the preordained

circumstances.’’ As we have seen, neither Liz, nor Alix, nor Esther comes from a well-

to-do family; their path to academic success is paved precisely by good education and

hard work. As Liz’s sister Shirley recalls, Liz used to shut herself up to study for exams

and ‘‘stuck grimly to her books and her duty and her long-term plans’’ (p. 46) while

Shirley was indulging in cosmetics and sex. For Drabble, as for her successful

heroines, the radiant way begins, as she recalls in her essay ‘‘The Radiant Way and

After,’’ with incessant brain work, in her case, reading and writing at home or on

trips (p. 115). The radiant way, as Libby suggests, signals the triumph of ‘‘the force of

individual will’’ against ‘‘the bounds of circumstance’’ (p. 176).

The force of history and individual will are further supplemented by these

women’s support network, woven and nurtured by their friendship. As years elapse,

the bonds that link them ‘‘grow deeper and more pervasive, embodying Alix’s

46Libby, ‘‘Fate and Feminism in the Novels of Margaret Drabble,’’ 176.

12 L. Lin

Woolfian conviction that human personality is a process, at once fluid and

interconnected.’’47 This conviction represents Alix’s more mature perception of

human relationships: ‘‘She had once thought of herself as unique, had been

encouraged to believe . . . in the individual self . . . but as she grew older she

increasingly questioned these concepts—seeing people . . . as a vast network, which

was humanity itself’’ (p. 69). The three friends’ residences in London enable them to

gather for lunches, teas, and walks (pp. 104, 231, 314, 374) and to nourish their

friendship to such an extent that they become reliant on, and trustful of, one another.

Saddened by Charles’s affair, for example, Liz expects to draw much support from

her two oldest and closest friends. When Liz rings Alix, she believes that ‘‘in speaking

to Alix her voice would find its normal level, her mind would return to its normal

tune’’ (p. 65). Transcending relationships defined by, for example, blood ties, family

ties, legal ties, sexual liaisons, and self-interest-related ties, their friendship is based on

pure ‘‘powerful human bonds’’48 that require no biological ties and obligation-bound

contracts; mutual appreciation and trust are all their friendship takes to perpetuate

itself.

Clearly, Drabble shares feminist novelists’ notions of female solidarity as an

inspiring source of support. However, Drabble does not reduce, as they do, female

bonding to a monolithic gesture to ‘‘sever the connections between culture and

biology, between reproduction, sexuality, and mothering.’’49 Rather, Drabble situates

female friendship within an inclusive network of human relationships that can be

equally enhancing and nourishing. Keenly alert to the gloomy status of modern

marriage, Drabble nonetheless believes that marriage is not, as some feminist

novelists would have us believe, an institution perpetuating the Rule of the Father.

Alix’s happy marriage to Brian, the ‘‘ideal husband’’ who can handle everything from

‘‘garden spades [and] power drills’’ to ‘‘her warm body’’ as his ‘‘friends and allies’’ (p.

67), proves quite rewarding.50 Liz’s divorce with Charles, on the other hand, falls

short of indicating the triumph of the male partner’s lust for power. Rather, their

breakup suggests the possible outcome of the modern marriage of a career couple.

Moreover, Liz’s decision not to follow Charles to New York, where his new job awaits

him, indirectly foments the divorce: ‘‘Nobody expected Liz to uproot herself, like a

woman, a wife, and follow her husband to America: she was expected to stay where

she was, pursuing her career and pursuing her own inner life’’ (p. 9). While depicting

Charles’s affair with Lady Henrietta, Drabble also exposes Liz’s affairs with several

men: ‘‘Roy . . . Philip, and Jules. She had finished with them all’’ (p. 13). Even Esther’s

47Rubenstein, ‘‘Sexuality and Intertextuality: Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way,’’ 98. 48Bokat, The Novels of Margaret Drabble, 149. 49Rosenfelt, ‘‘Feminism, ‘‘Postfeminism,’’’, 277. 50I note that Drabble’s representation of happy heterosexual relationships tends to trouble critics. For Fox-

Genovese (‘The Ambiguities of Female Identity: A Reading of The Novels of Margaret Drabble,’’ 235), for

example, Drabble’s non-antagonistic perception of gender relations suggests a ‘‘retreat to masculinity or

androgyny.’’ For Beards (‘‘Margaret Drabble: Novels of a Cautious Feminist,’’ 40), on the other hand, Drabble’s

portrayal of single women ‘‘without marriage or male dominance . . . suggests a growth in the author’s feminist

consciousness.’’

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction 13

quasi-adulterous relationships with two married men seem reasonably healthy and

harmless; she even befriends the wife and sister of one of the suitors.’’51

Not only do the three women derive solace from the affectionate solidarity of the

same sex, but they draw emotional and spiritual support from male friends, especially

when life turns tough. Stephen Cox, whom Liz can ‘‘trust,’’ and who would never

‘‘impose’’ (p. 242), ‘‘proves a useful ally’’ (p. 243) and ‘‘a pleasant escort’’ (p. 242)

when she worries that the break-up of her marriage might ‘‘portend a life of solitary

and uninvited neglect’’ (p. 242), and indeed, when her ‘‘snobbish’’ friends drop her

and ‘‘forget her existence’’ (p. 243), Stephen continues to correspond and dine with

Liz; to cheer her up, he even ‘‘takes Liz to the theater to see Hilda Stark play Hedda

Gabler’’ (p. 243). Their friendship further grows in The Gates of Ivory, in which

Stephen invites Liz to join him in exotic Cambodia. Alix befriends Otto Werner, her

colleague at the Garfield Center, with whom she shares her feelings of ‘‘despair’’ and

‘‘hopeless [ness]’’ (p. 341) when her husband faces possible unemployment. Their

friendship almost deepens into ‘‘love’’ (p. 301), and they linger, for a while, on the

verge of ‘‘a wonderful disaster’’ (p. 301). Yet, being ‘‘serious people, seriously

married’’ (p. 300), Alix and Otto manage to save their marriages and avoid the

disaster. Esther, in her own way, discovers in Claudio Volpe, the learned Italian

anthropologist, ‘‘the great [spiritual] love of her life’’ (p. 328), with whom she forges

a ‘‘mystic intimacy’’ (p. 273) that lasts until Claudio’s death.

Drabble returns to spatial trope again after the flashback section using lunch as a

narrative occasion to further bring out the diversity of the three women’s lives. But

the lunch episode here expands that diversity to the broader realm of human lives by

juxtaposing the lunches of the three women with those of other characters. Through

Liz’s musing over her lunch, Drabble reveals another aspect of Liz’s inner life

troubled earlier by her ‘‘sexual fantasies’’ (p. 132) of her father and now by her

‘‘sexual jealousy’’ of Charles’s lover and her ‘‘doubts’’ (p. 135) about herself. Unlike

the moody Liz, Esther is having a good day because she received an invitation that

morning to Bologna to ‘‘deliver her opinion on the authenticity of a painting possibly

by Carlo Crivelli himself, possibly by his brother Vittore’’ (p. 138). Alix spends most

of her lunch hour shopping for the dinner she is to present to Liz and Stephen Cox;

she buys a piece of pie to eat in her office after she is done with her shopping. Alix’s

activity reinforces her commitment to social work by revealing her involvement in

the Home Office that deals with the care and control of women offenders. Shirley eats

her lunch at her Northam home, an episode that reveals her frustration with her

51One notes that adulterous and quasi-adulterous relationships are familiar scenarios in Drabble’s novels. Some

of these relationships are harmless to the extent that they cause no problems for the parties involved as in the

Frances – Karel affair in The Realms of Gold and the Kate – Ted affair in The Middle Ground, while others are less

so as in the Charles – Henrietta affair in The Radiant Way, which causes Liz a great deal of pain. For Drabble,

both types of affairs are what happens in real life, and for her, truth is more important than ideology. In the

interview with John Hannay (‘‘Margaret Drabble: An Interview,’’ 148), Drabble expresses her uneasiness with

feminist critics’ expectation of how she should write her novels: ‘‘I don’t like the way the feminists think I ought

to be writing a blueprint for everybody’s life. I don’t see that at all.’’

14 L. Lin

underemployment and her boredom (p. 141) with tedious domestic duties; both have

rubbed away her desire for libraries and books. Her husband Cliff eats his lunch at a

local pub. Here Drabble presents Cliff as a successful businessman whose wing-

mirror company continues to prosper while other small businesses have been hit by

the impending recession. Finally, Charles’s quick work lunch, which he eats in his

New York office, is suggestive of his hectic cosmopolitan lifestyle; while eating, he

makes business calls to ‘‘Los Angeles, Detroit, Washington, Bogota’’ (p. 146) and

‘‘Toronto’’ (p. 147).

Drabble’s use of such basic activity as lunch to link the lives of the three women

and those related to them within a global context further revises the feminist linear

plot of oppression and resistance. Here, the diversity of female experiences in

particular and human experiences in general is demonstrated by means of food and

by the manners in which it is consumed. Both shed light on a variety of personalities

and lifestyles, male and female, rural and cosmopolitan. Writing about the function

of parallel plots, Mieke Bal52 remarks: ‘‘[T]he elaboration of parallel strings of one

fabula makes it difficult to recognize one single chronological sequence in that fabula.

Several events happen at the same time.’’ The disappearance of the chronology of one

single event, as shown by the spatial presentation of the parties, New Year’s Day, and

the lunches, makes the reading experience analogous to watching television programs

or films presented in the montage mode.53 One recalls CNN’s ‘‘Millennium 2000,’’ an

exclusive program broadcasting millennium celebrations around the world. One way

CNN handled this program was by juxtaposing the midnight cheering of several

nations; what the audience saw on the television screen was a mosaic picture of

fireworks and cheering crowds: fireworks shot centrifugally from the Eiffel Tower,

exploding over The River Thames, coloring the skies of Beijing, New Delhi, and

Tokyo, and so forth. CNN’s juxtaposition of multiple cheering scenes emphasizes

how diverse peoples in their different manners—dancing different dances, shouting

different greetings, and consuming different liquids—simultaneously celebrate the

entrance into the new millennium.

This striking parallel between spatial narrative trope and the montage technique

inevitably calls into question the dominant critical tradition that regards linear

ordering as the primary organizing principle of the novel. Because of M. M. Bakhtin’s

influential authority on the theory of the novel, his essay ‘‘Forms of Time and of the

Chronotope in the Novel’’ typically illustrates this tradition. Bakhtin identifies ‘‘the

intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’’54 as an important

generic feature of narrative literature. For Bakhtin, as Danow notes, time and space in

4 52Bal, , 213. 53The disappearance of a linear master plot in The Radiant Way also makes the novel analogous to what Sandra

Zagarell (‘‘Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre,’’ 503) calls ‘‘narratives of community’’ that

‘‘ignore linear development or chronological sequence.’’ Such narratives of community, popular in nineteenth-

century literature, ‘‘tend to be episodic, built primarily around the continuous small-scale negotiations and daily

procedures through which communities sustain themselves.’’ 54Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84.

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction 15

narrative literature are ‘‘indispensable and inseparable,’’55 always fused into an

artistic whole because the change of space always implies the movement of time, and

Bakhtin terms this whole ‘‘chronotope.’’56 As Bakhtin states, ‘‘[I]n literature and art,

temporal and spatial relations are inseparable from one another,’’ and this

inseparableness constitutes a literary work’s artistic unity in relation to an actual

reality.’’57 Yet, as my analysis of Drabble’s spatial trope in The Radiant Way suggests,

time in narrative literature can indeed be separated from space, and the movement of

space does not necessarily involve the movement of time, as Bakhtin claims. Joseph

Frank’s study of spatial form also questions the adequacy of Bakhtin’s theory of

chronotope. Frank shows that such authors as Gustave Flaubert ‘‘ideally intend the

reader to apprehend their works spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a

sequence.’’58 To explain his point, Frank refers to Flaubert’s county fair scene in

Madame Bovary to show that Flaubert dramatizes three levels of action

simultaneously in one scene: ‘‘the surging, jostling mob in the street, mingling with

the livestock brought to the exhibitions . . . the speechmaking officials, bombastically

reeling off platitudes to the attentive multitudes . . . and Rodolphe and Emma . . .

watching the proceedings and carrying on their amorous conversation . . .’’59 Frank

succinctly concludes:

This scene illustrates, on a small scale, what we mean by the spatialization of form in a novel. For the duration of the scene, at least, the time-flow of the narrative is

halted; attention is fixed on the interplay of relationships within the immobilized

time-area. These relationships are juxtaposed independently of the progress of the

narrative, and the full significance of the scene is given only by the reflexive

relations among the units of meaning.60

Although Flaubert appropriates spatial form not for postfeminist purposes, as

Drabble does, he certainly shares her belief in the interconnectedness and wholeness

of human experience. What connects these two authors is their common fascination

with the significance of the diversity and simultaneity of actions and events. To quote

Flaubert: ‘‘One should hear the bellowing of cattle, the whispering of the lovers, and

the rhetoric of the officials all at the same time’’61 because for Flaubert, as for

Drabble, ‘‘a knowledge of the whole is essential to an understanding of any part.’’62

55Danow, Models of Narrative: Theory and Practice, 25. 56Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84. 57Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 243. 58Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 10. 59Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 16. 60Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 17. 61Quoted in Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 17. 62Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 21. In addition to Madame Bovary, Frank also analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. For discussions of these works, see Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 18 – 21, 28 – 53.

For an additional analysis of Flaubert’s use of spatial form in Trois Contes, see Selvin, ‘‘Spatial Form in Flaubert’s

Trois Contes.’’ For a critique of Frank’s theory of spatial form, see Kermode, ‘‘A Reply to Joseph Frank.’’ For

background readings on spatial form, see Smitten and Daghistany, Spatial Form in Narrative.

16 L. Lin

While Drabble’s use of spatial narrative trope to emphasize the diversity of female

experiences and her appositive, rather than antagonistic, perception of gender

relations in The Radiant Way strongly suggest this author’s kinship with

postfeminism, they also clearly signal her ongoing negotiations with the critical

school of feminism she previously endorsed and, hence, her evolution from a feminist

novelist to a postfeminist novelist. There is little doubt that Drabble’s early novels

register the influence of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which she read during

her last year at Cambridge. Novels such as A Summer Bird-Cage (1962), The Garrick

Year (1964), and The Millstone (1965) largely present a feminist anatomy that exposes

women’s predicament in a male-dominated world with ‘‘narrow choices for educated

women’’.63 Sarah Bennett in A Summer Bird-Cage, for example, confronts the choice

of a loveless marriage or a boring academic career after graduating from Oxford.64

Drabble’s middle and late novels, however, display a more mature novelist no longer

certain of her early feminist analysis of women’s plight. As Ellen Rose notes, The

Needle’s Eye (1972) ‘‘divid[es] her [Drabble’s] career quite neatly in two;’’65

thereafter, Drabble began tackling ‘‘broader themes’’66 that are not ‘‘limited to the

situation of women,’’67 themes that include ‘‘strong male characters, the effect of

heredity and environment on character, or the condition of England.’’68 In the 1987

interview with Cooper-Clark, the same year she published The Radiant Way, Drabble

advised women novelists to guard against the epistemological delusions of sexism and

narcissism and spoke of her reservations about the narrowness of feminist fiction: ‘‘In

some of my books I’ve tried to avoid writing as a woman because it does create its

own narrowness.69 . . . I’m not at all keen on the view that there is a male conspiracy

to put women down. Both sexes are at fault.70 . . . I think [motherhood is] the greatest

joy in the world.’’71

To avoid the narrowness of feminist fiction, Drabble began to look for more

inclusive narrative modes to represent women, an effort that parallels her experiment

with spatial narrative trope in her post-1972 novels. In The Realms of Gold (1976), for

example, Drabble tackles the diversity and complexity of female experiences by

including women of different sexual orientations, among whom are Frances Wingate,

a successful university professor, a single mother, and an adulteress, and Joy Schmidt

who eventually leaves her husband and children to live in ‘‘a lesbian commune’’ (p.

351). For Drabble, Frances’s and Joy’s choices of sexual orientation suggest neither

their surrender nor resistance to male supremacy; rather, their choices are based on

their needs as sexual subjects and individuals. While Joy is fed up with

63Bokat, The Novels of Margaret Drabble, 142. 64Rose, The Novels of Margaret Drabble, 3. 65Rose, The Novels of Margaret Drabble, 4. 66Rose, The Novels of Margaret Drabble, 4. 67Rose, The Novels of Margaret Drabble, 5. 68Rose, The Novels of Margaret Drabble, 4. 69Drabble, ‘‘Interview with Diana Cooper-Clark,’’ 19. 70Drabble, ‘‘Interview with Diana Cooper-Clark,’’ 21. 71Drabble, ‘‘Interview with Diana Cooper-Clark,’’ 28.

Spatial Narrative and Postfeminist Fiction 17

heterosexuality and traditional family life and finds love in her partner Vera, Frances

is much drawn to these two modes of life and finds true love in Joy’s husband Karel.

Through Karel’s and Frances’s hard-won yet productive love relationship, Drabble

shows that Karel, like Frances, is capable of serious love, even when he acts as an

unfaithful husband. On one occasion, Drabble juxtaposes the activities of Frances and

Karel to show the quality of attachment of two lovers: ‘‘While Frances Wingate sat in

her parents’ sitting room gazing over the darkening wastes, fobbing off her parents

with some account of their grandson . . . (why should they be given her true feelings

[for Karel]?), Schmidt sat in his room at the Polytechnic, staring at a pile of essays,

and thought of Frances Wingate’’ (p. 90).72

In The Middle Ground (1980), Drabble continues to dramatize the diversity and

complexity of female experiences by including progressive and traditional women.

Drabble also manipulates spatial narrative more prominently. A successful journalist

who believes in women’s freedom and independence, Kate Armstrong refuses to

sacrifice her talent and career for her family and divorces her unfaithful husband. For

Mary J. Elkins, Kate represents an exemplary ‘‘woman with everything . . . a self-made

woman,’’ who, having conquered her uncompromising beginnings, has created a life

for herself.’’73 Evelyn Stennett, a devoted social worker, on the other hand, holds 1 conservative views about marriage and family. Well aware of her husband’s affair

with Kate, Evelyn willingly puts up with him; she even tries to hide her knowledge of

the affair for fear it may ‘‘destroy the delicate equilibrium that balanced [the three of]

them’’ (p. 55). For Evelyn, a loveless marriage offers striking advantages in that the

partners share ‘‘a kind of cracked solidarity, a worn peacefulness, like an old white

plate,’’ which she does not want to throw away ‘‘when it still served’’ (p. 149).

Drabble further brings out Kate’s and Evelyn’s diverse rhythms of life by frequently

juxtaposing the activities of both characters. On one occasion, Drabble juxtaposes

how Kate and Evelyn handle dinners. While Kate takes her family to dinner at the Tai 2 Mahal, a reasonable arrangement by a single working mother, Evelyn is playing the

role of a sweet hostess ‘‘dishing up chicken in lemon sauce’’ to her ‘‘slightly jet-lagged

husband’’ (p. 209). After dinner, Evelyn is content with sleeping ‘‘on her side of the

bed’’ separated from her husband’s side by ‘‘a slope’’ made by her effort to ‘‘keep well

away from [him] at night’’ (p. 214). As Elkins perceptively notes, spatial narrative in

The Middle Ground ‘‘takes up to one-third of the novel; for over one hundred pages,

the major characters live separately, but not entirely unrelated and within the same

time period, a period elongated by repetition and by transitions which stress the

simultaneity’74

72For a perceptive analysis of Drabble’s application of spatial form in The Realms of Gold, see Davis, ‘‘Unfolding

Form: Narrative Approach and Theme in The Realms of Gold,’’ 141 – 50. 73Elkins, ‘‘Alenoushka’s Return: Motifs and Movement in Margaret Drabble’s The Middle Ground,’’ 169. 74Elkins, ‘‘Alenoushka’s Return: Motifs and Movement in Margaret Drabble’s The Middle Ground,’’ 171. In

addition to Davis and Elkins, Lay has written on Drabble’s application of spatial narrative trope. My own

analysis of The Radiant Way is encouraged by these critics; at the same time, however, my analysis breaks new

ground by illuminating the crucial relationship between spatial narrative trope and postfeminist fiction.

18 L. Lin

From A Summer Bird-Cage through The Realms of Gold and The Middle Ground to

The Radiant Way, we perceive a clear trajectory of Drabble’s ongoing negotiations

with the critical school of feminism. From Sarah Bennett through Frances Wingate,

Joy Schmidt, Kate Armstrong, Evelyn Stennett to Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, and

Esther Breuer, we can trace Drabble’s continuing efforts to explore new ways to

represent women. Drabble’s aspiration for more inclusive narrative modes to account

for the diversity and complexity of women’s experiences has clearly led her to

produce the kind of novels no longer readily susceptible to a feminist interpretation

aimed chiefly at exposing unequal gender relations accountable for women’s dilemma

in post-war British society. The very complexity of these novels thus demands new

interpretations that are equally inclusive, interpretations that will help us understand

the many heterogeneous, fluctuating, and even conflicting meanings that punctuate

the signifier female—as ‘‘mother, woman, hysteric . . .’’75 By revealing the formal and

ethic kinship of The Radiant Way to postfeminist fiction and by illuminating

Drabble’s evolution from a feminist novelist to a postfeminist novelist, this essay has

suggested strategies that shed light on how a new postfeminist interpretation of

Drabble’s novels in particular and of contemporary women’s fiction in general can be

pursued.

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this essay to my son, Yuhao, for kindly supporting a career mother, who

spent little time with him while working on this essay and other projects. His spirit of

generosity and compassion has immensely inspired me. Dan Albright and Jim Elston

read earlier drafts of this essay and offered valuable suggestions; I am in their debts.

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527.

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QUERIES: to be answered by AUTHOR

AUTHOR: The following queries have arisen during the editing of your manuscript. Please answer the queries by marking the requisite corrections at the appropriate positions in the text.

QUERY NO. QUERY DETAILS QUERY ANSWERED

1 There’s a closing quote here but no opening quote; please advise.

2 ‘Tai Mahal’ – sic? ‘Taj’ would be more likely.

3 Is this ref. to Bowen or The Gates of Ivory?

4 Please supply ref for Mieke Bal.

5 Fink reference – ‘‘By Jacques Lacan’’ – Do you mean ‘‘, edited by

Jacques Lacan’’?

6 In the footnotes, I have added the publication or chapter title

whenever an author is cited in each case. Please check

7 Footnote 13: ‘‘see Tong, especially ‘‘Biological Sex and Patriarchal

Gender’’ 95–138.’’ – This reference should be given in full in the

reference list.

8 I have changed ‘‘Green’’ in footnote 40 to ‘‘Greene’’ to match

reference list. Please check. Also, in the same footnote ‘‘Interview

with Kenyon,’’ – where is this in the reference list?